Conventional communications devices, such as cellular phones, personal digital assistants, personal computers, laptops and the like, transfer data between one another using various communications protocols and networking technologies. Examples include communications over local area networks “LANs”, wireless local area networks “WLANs”, cellular phone networks, the Internet, etc.). Generally, such conventional communications devices enable users to transmit information between one another in various formats using a variety of applications, for example, email applications, text messaging applications, instant messaging applications and other such applications involved in data communications. Typically, in transmitting text-based data between conventional communication devices, the data is represented in an encoded numerical or binary format (e.g., American Standard Code for Information Interchange ‘ASCII’). For example, a user sending a text message may enter text into his or her device via an input mechanism (e.g., keyboard, stylus, voice recognition software, etc.) and, subsequently, the communications device processes the text data into a numerically encoded data format. The device then transmits this encoded text to a remote device via one or more data communications protocols. Consequently, a conventional communications device receiving the encoded text-based data message then decodes the transmitted data such that the text information can be graphically displayed on the device to a receiving user.
Generally, to decode a message for display as text or other graphical symbols, conventional communication devices maintain a set of graphical representations for characters in a language preferred by a user of the device. For example, the English alphabet has a one-to-one representation between encoded ASCII character data and corresponding graphical symbols (e.g., “A”, “B” . . . “Z”) used to render or display a visual representation of those characters in a specific font. Thus, a conventional communications device can maintain 26 basic symbols, less punctuation and other ancillary symbols, in order to decode and display encoded text data transmissions. Furthermore, graphical representations of these symbols may have a font family value (e.g., Times, Arial, etc.) associated with the particular character(s) that are being displayed. Each font family, in turn, may comprise various font values that indicate a particular size (e.g., defined as a point size), weight (e.g., light, bold, black, etc.) and orientation (e.g., roman, italic, oblique, etc.). As such, each particular font variation is graphically represented by a “glyph”, or a combination of glyphs that have been integrated with one another. The term “glyph” then generally refers to character instances, specific to style and, depending on the format, size. As an example, for the letter “A” in the English alphabet, there may be a different glyph for upper and lower case versions of this letter in each different font that a device can display. However, in ideographically oriented language systems, such as in the Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages, each font family may contain thousands, or tens of thousands, of ideographs or glyphs representing various font values within the font family.